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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25371340">Huntsman's Honor</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lomonaaeren/pseuds/Lomonaaeren'>Lomonaaeren</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>From Litha to Lammas 2020 [11]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Angst, Animal Harm, Dark Harry Potter, Drama, Gore, M/M, Master of Death Harry Potter, Not Epilogue Compliant, Ritual Magic, Ritual Sex, Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-07-19</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-07-20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 09:54:52</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Explicit</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>3</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>15,036</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25371340</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lomonaaeren/pseuds/Lomonaaeren</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Harry has long wanted to perform a ritual that might let him bring Sirius back through the Veil, but he needed help to both gather the ingredients and cast the ritual itself. And accepting that that help could come from Lucius Malfoy took him even longer.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Lucius Malfoy/Harry Potter</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>From Litha to Lammas 2020 [11]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1795561</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>57</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>787</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Chapter 1</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>This is another of my “From Litha to Lammas” fics, being posted between the summer solstice and the first of August. This is in response to a request by nia_kantorka, who asked for Harry/Lucius with the prompt of <i>Harry always wanted to try that ritual. Now he’s got the partner(s) to actually do so.</i> There will be three parts total. Please read the tags carefully; this is a very dark fic.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Harry braced himself. It felt halfway silly to do so when he’d come this far and actually through the gates of Malfoy Manor, but he still had to do it.</p><p>He knocked.</p><p>There was a long silence, although Harry had waited before the gates long enough that he’d thought the house-elves were telling Malfoy he was here. Then the door swung open, a huge stone portal that creaked as if it was made of wood, and Lucius Malfoy studied him in silence before he nodded.</p><p>“Mr. Potter. You might as well come inside.”</p><p>Harry nodded and did just that, keeping his back straight and his stare the same, so that he looked slightly past Malfoy as the man folded his arms and studied him. Frankly, he had given up a lot of his pride already to reach this point. If Malfoy wouldn’t agree to help him, Harry would find someone else, but he refused to be embarrassed no matter <em>what </em>the requirements of the ritual.</p><p>“Your letter said that you had a sensitive subject to discuss with me. Is it about Draco?”</p><p>Harry blinked and turned to look Malfoy in the face. He could see how the man might have thought that. “No. Or about your wife, or your term in Azkaban, either.”</p><p>Malfoy’s shoulders hunched a little, as if he was waiting for wings to grow out of them. “Narcissa is no longer my wife.”</p><p>Harry had been aware of that, abstractly, although the endless speculation in the paper over the Malfoy separation hadn’t included any concrete reasons. On the other hand, he wouldn’t have approached a married man for help with this particular ritual. “All right. But it’s not about that, or your family legacy. It’s about a ritual that you might be willing to help me with, one that’s considered Dark Arts.”</p><p>There was a long pause that made Harry feel as if the snow outside had settled on him and frozen him. Malfoy’s eyes, which seemed somewhere between grey and ice, surveyed him, and then Malfoy turned and walked through a door that led into what looked like a wide room covered with bookshelves.</p><p>Deciding it was the best invitation he was going to get, Harry followed.</p><p>*</p><p>Lucius Malfoy looked at the arrogant young man sitting in the huge wingback chair across from him, and wondered.</p><p>Well, no. “Arrogant” was more a judgment than a reality. Harry Potter had changed, in the years since the war. He’d withdrawn more and more from society. He hadn’t married the Weasley girl, as Lucius had considered all but inevitable (although, to be fair, the likelihood of that had been based mostly on Draco’s reports, and Draco had been wrong about many things concerning Potter). He’d sued the <em>Daily Prophet </em>for spreading stories about him visiting a Mind-Healer and won. He’d become interested in esoteric magic, if the rumors Lucius had heard floating around Knockturn Alley were correct.</p><p>It was probably the last that had brought Potter to him. And why not? Everything seemed to return to Knockturn Alley. Lucius’s determination to find a magical way of restoring the Malfoy fortune had cost him his marriage. Narcissa still loved him, she’d said, but she didn’t love him enough to stay with him while he forged ahead in Dark Arts.</p><p>“Mr. Malfoy?”</p><p>Lucius supposed it had been rather a long time since he’d spoken. Rather a long time since the elves had brought the mulled wine and lit the fire, in fact. He summoned a small smile. “What have you come to ask for my help with, Mr. Potter?”</p><p>“The Ritual of Bone and Soul.”</p><p>Lucius was master enough of himself to keep from dropping the wine, but only just. He set the glass on the table beside him and stared at Potter. Potter just kept staring back, although a slight flush had mounted to his cheeks. Lucius was beginning to think that the way he’d blushed when Lucius opened the door didn’t relate to the cold.</p><p>“What?” he whispered. “Do you know what it <em>involves</em>? That it often takes the caster’s soul?”</p><p>“Oh, yes, and it doesn’t have to be the caster’s soul. I’ve researched rituals like this extensively for the past eight years.” Potter’s eyes narrowed, which made the determination in them more noticeable than their striking color, for once. “To find a way to bring my godfather Sirius Black back from the Veil.”</p><p>Lucius supposed he should have known that. There was no one else Potter could resurrect, given that they would have had bodies buried. “You want to build a body for him. What makes you think you could summon his spirit and keep the price from falling on you?”</p><p>“Because I know more about the Veil than anyone outside the Unspeakables.” The glitter in Potter’s eyes now was sharp and queer. “And I know that if a living being enters it, the soul is instantly reft from the body. But the soul doesn’t pass on to another life or become a ghost. It simply drifts forever. That’s why it used to be considered a particularly fit punishment for heinous crimes, because the criminals who were punished that way had sacrificed eternity as well as their lives.”</p><p>Lucius picked the wine back up. He had the feeling he was going to need it. “You need my help hunting down the ingredients.”</p><p>“Yes.” Potter’s gaze was direct. “Some of them I can purchase, but others need harvesting, and I don’t know enough about the Dark Arts to create the right harvesting procedures. I spent the last eight years studying ritual magic, not curses. And I need someone who is a talented and powerful Dark wizard for the last part of the rite, as well.”</p><p>“The—sex that infuses the new body with a heartbeat.”</p><p>“Yes.”</p><p>Lucius closed his eyes, overwhelmed. “Why would you choose me? Even with Dark Arts expertise a requirement, you could have found someone else you didn’t have my history with.”</p><p>“The history is what I want,” Potter said. “I know you won’t go to the papers with this because of the debts that your family owes me. And I know that you have the power. And one more reason.”</p><p>Lucius had to open his eyes, because the silence had fallen again. Potter was gazing at him, but slightly off to the side. No, wait. He was staring at Lucius’s left arm.</p><p>Lucius swallowed. “You cannot think that this ritual would—use the Dark Mark in any way.”</p><p>“The Ritual of Bone and Soul calls for the sacrifice of what <em>once </em>held a piece of a Dark Lord’s soul,” Potter said. “The traditional sacrifice is an artifact or sometimes a dead infant who supposedly was a Dark Lord’s reincarnation. I could use the artifact, I suppose, but I would rather not go after the few that might still exist.”</p><p>Lucius covered his left arm with a trembling hand. It was true that Potter could have offered him few more seductive lures, but he had to speak. “I never had a piece of the Dark Lord’s soul in my arm. Otherwise, he would still be alive.”</p><p>Potter shook his head. “His soul was unstable from the Horcruxes he created, you know that.” Lucius was grateful that Potter didn’t use the Dark Lord’s name. “That means that the piece in his body wouldn’t have been able to cling to a body at all, or even possess a living host, if he didn’t share links to living bodies with complete or only partially-tattered souls. It was a small piece of each one, so it wouldn’t have kept him alive when the Horcruxes were gone unless <em>all </em>the Death Eaters he’d ever Marked were still living. But it can count as a sacrifice for this.” He leaned forwards. “I can remove it.”</p><p>And that was the reason, in the end, that Lucius chose the madness of this path forwards.</p><p>*</p><p>“You were willing to come here.”</p><p>Harry smiled, his eyes focused ahead. Malfoy was walking behind him, the variant of the <em>Lumos </em>Charm they’d both cast on their eyes helping them see in the darkness without alerting their prey by a glow. “Yes.”</p><p>“You are, perhaps, as mad as I first thought you were.”</p><p>Harry shrugged. “I’d do anything to bring my godfather back, because he’s the only chance I’ve got at family. Yes, it’s a kind of madness.”</p><p>“I thought that the Weasleys were your family. Of a sort.”</p><p>Malfoy didn’t inflect his voice with as much contempt as he could have, which made Harry relax internally. “They were my family, but they expected me to—mourn and go on. I can’t do that. I think I’m messed-up in the head. They grieved their dead brother, their dead son, and they share the experience of it. But no one else mourns Sirius. And I still have nightmares of someone who died in the war every single night.”</p><p>Malfoy paused behind him for a long moment. Then they continued rustling together down the path into the Forbidden Forest. “That is another explanation for why you didn’t marry the Weasley girl.”</p><p>Harry just nodded, because it had been more than that, but Malfoy wouldn’t have any interest in hearing about it. The forest ahead of them abruptly widened out into a clearing, and Harry smiled. “Here we are.”</p><p>An Acromantula youngster was crouched in front of them, fangs bared. Harry had known one would come hunting. Most of them weren’t as smart as Aragog, and would consider humans prey instead of something to be avoided.</p><p>“You want me to use the Dark spell, then.” Malfoy’s voice was only a breath, but Harry heard the sweep of cloth that meant his wand was coming out of his holster.</p><p>“Yes.” Harry studied the shadows sliding over the giant spider’s body as it crept a little towards them. It would assume they couldn’t sense it as well as it could sense them. “I’ll kill it once you’ve done that.”</p><p>Malfoy nodded, or Harry assumed he did. He didn’t turn to look. Harry couldn’t force himself to take his eyes from the Acromantula, not now. His body was shaking with excitement. This was the second substantial step forwards on the path back to Sirius, after talking to Malfoy.</p><p>Malfoy moved forwards to stand next to Harry, and spun his wand. The pattern was blurring even to Harry’s enhanced eyes, and he blinked, but didn’t look away, as Malfoy incanted, “<em>Falsus unicornis</em>!”</p><p>The spell spread out as a rank, dark fog, and flowed over the Acromantula. Harry thought he might have heard a high-pitched shriek from it, but he wasn’t sure. In any case, a few seconds later, the shrieking, if it existed, had definitely become a high-pitched neigh. The Acromantula had vanished, and in its place, thrashing around on four legs it was obviously unused to, was a shadow-colored unicorn with a horn that flickered like a shaft of uncertain light.</p><p>Harry pointed his wand, and cast the Killing Curse silently. The false unicorn shrieked once more, and died. As it crashed to the ground, the flickering horn solidified, and Harry stepped forwards and used another curse to hack it off at the base.</p><p>Malfoy made a gulping sound. Harry knew why. This wouldn’t curse them in the same way slaughtering a real unicorn for its blood or horn would have, but to someone who had grown up knowing those tales, the sight of a shining spiral horn gripped in Harry’s hand still had to strike hard.</p><p>“I thought you said you hadn’t made a study of curses.”</p><p>Harry holstered the singing Elder Wand and shrugged. “Those, I already knew.”</p><p>The horn felt like a frog in his hand, but it was real enough. Another step taken.</p><p>*</p><p>“And we had to come to Knockturn Alley to find this?”</p><p>Lucius didn’t turn around as he led the way into the alley. Potter’s voice was fierce, but at least it was low. People might glance at them and think they were victims, but Lucius carried his wand openly and let his magic play around him in lazy swirls of warm wind. It was unlikely.</p><p>“Of course we do. This is the only place in Britain where it’s sold, and you know it’s vital for the ritual that we buy it, not steal it.”</p><p>“While cursing the owner.”</p><p>“Of course.” Lucius smiled as the front of Borgin and Burke’s appeared in front of him. He had to admit, he would enjoy this more than any of the other harvesting chores they had to undertake. “Follow me, and don’t breathe so deeply. Borgin has some traps that propagate via fumes in the air.”</p><p>Potter snorted, but said nothing as they stepped through the dark, heavy door. An invisible bell jangled overhead, and Borgin limped out from an illusory cavern behind the counter to stare at them.</p><p>“What do you want?”</p><p>“A giant’s Hand of Glory,” Lucius said. “I know you have one.” He tilted back his hood enough that Borgin could see his face, and watched the disgust and the uneasiness twine together in the man’s expression. The people on the Darker side of the law in wizarding Britain never knew what to make of Lucius now, since he still carried the Mark on his arm but had escaped Azkaban without even an Imperius defense the second time.</p><p>Borgin, after a moment, decided he cared more about money than anything else, and snorted rudely. “Yeah? You think that I’d sell one of them to <em>you</em> when it would mean getting cursed myself?”</p><p>Lucius held back his own scowl. Well, there were few enough rituals that used a Hand of Glory made from a giant; he should have guessed that Borgin would be familiar with this one. He opened his mouth to answer, but Potter stepped past him.</p><p>He had let his own magic loose. Lucius found himself staring at the man’s back as a great flapping set of black wings seemed to fill the shop. The air turned colder, and frost crept across the floor. Potter held up his hands in front of him, no wand in sight.</p><p>There was a brewing globe of darkness between them, which resembled a tarnished crystal ball. Potter held it out towards Borgin.</p><p>“Look at this, and see your fate if you <em>don’t </em>submit to selling us the giant’s Hand and the curse,” he said softly. “I promise, the curse is better.”</p><p>Borgin opened his mouth and then froze. Lucius could still see nothing except the moving darkness from where he stood behind Potter, but obviously Borgin could see more than that. He began to gibber, very softly at first, and then louder. At last he was screaming, foam breaking from his jaws.</p><p>“No more! No more!” he wailed.</p><p>Lucius was about to intervene, fearing that Potter might drive Borgin mad, and then it would be impossible to fulfill the harvest—the owner had to consciously accept money for the Hand of Glory—when Potter nodded and dropped his hands. The darkness wisped away into nothingness and the frost melted. “Very well. Sell it to us.”</p><p>Borgin scuttled into the cavern he’d emerged from and came back dragging what looked like an enormous lump of half-melted wax. Lucius wrinkled his nose as the distinct smell of giant came to him, but waited until Potter had handed Borgin the thousand Galleons required before he lifted his wand.</p><p>He cursed Borgin with a year of nightmares. From the way Borgin shuddered and bowed his head, he probably expected to relive whatever Potter had shown him, but that still seemed to best actually living through it for him.</p><p>Lucius waited until Potter had shrunken the hand and they were outside the shop before he asked, “What did you show him?”</p><p>Potter glanced at him. “His fate.”</p><p>“You said you didn’t know the Dark Arts…”</p><p>“And I said I spent eight years studying ritual magic. Besides, not all the stories spread about me after the war were false.”</p><p>It took Lucius another thirty steps to remember what stories those must be, and then he had to force himself to keep walking and not just gape at Potter’s back.</p><p>
  <em>Master of Death.</em>
</p><p>He shivered, and kept moving, glad he was on Potter’s side both literally and metaphorically.</p><p>*</p><p>“We should discuss the sexual part of the ritual.”</p><p>Harry opened his eyes. He’d been sitting in meditation before the fire in Malfoy’s largest sitting room. But meditation was something he had practiced for eight years, and he could always go back to it later. “All right,” he agreed, turning on the layered rug to look at Malfoy.</p><p>The man paused, for some reason, in the middle of a step. He stared down at Harry where he sat. Harry raised his eyebrows. Sometimes when he meditated he swooped among strange thoughts. Maybe he’d been wearing a hostile expression or a weird one, despite how he’d felt.</p><p>“You are not—worried about this?” Malfoy’s voice was as hesitant as his steps, but at least he walked around Harry and sat down in a chair not far from the fire.</p><p>Harry bit back harsh amusement. He shrugged. “I’m worried that the ritual won’t go well. I’m worried that we might mess up in the ways we need to harvest ingredients and have to start over. I’m worried that I might not see Sirius again. But about having sex in a ritual context? No.”</p><p>“You have had sex in a ritual context before?”</p><p>“No.”</p><p>Malfoy frowned, which marred his face like a crack in porcelain. His face was made for sneers and scowls, Harry thought absently, not frowns of concern. “Then we <em>must </em>discuss it. You will not be expecting—the intensity.”</p><p>“I think I know how intense ritual magic can get,” Harry said. Let Malfoy take what warning he would from the quietness of his voice. Harry wasn’t as experienced as Malfoy—he couldn’t be, not given how much longer Malfoy had lived and his intimate familiarity with Dark Arts—but he had participated in rituals as well as studying them. “And besides, it’s going to be different because we’re not creating sex magic with this ritual.”</p><p>Malfoy paused. “Yes, we are. That is the sort of misconception we should—”</p><p>“I mean that the <em>primary </em>purpose of the ritual isn’t some kind of conception or sexual enhancement.” Harry eased impatience out of his voice by picturing Sirius in front of him, and what it would be like when he had his godfather back, and all his irritation would drain and vanish. “The sex is a tool, like the Hand of Glory. My focus, and yours, should be elsewhere.”</p><p>“A mature way of looking at it.”</p><p>“Thank you.”</p><p>“But a cold one.”</p><p>Harry shrugged. “I want my godfather back more than I want anything else in life, Mr. Malfoy. I know that you probably don’t want your Mark gone more than you want anything else in life, but you’re participating as if that’s true. Keep your focus on that, please. Don’t worry about me.”</p><p>“If you are going to be on top, then perhaps—” Malfoy trailed off, no doubt because of the way Harry was staring at him. “What?”</p><p>“Don’t worry, I’m annoyed at myself and not you,” Harry said, shaking his head when he saw Malfoy begin to indignantly form the word <em>worried </em>with his mouth. “I really did forget that I hadn’t told you about one of the sacrifices in the ritual.”</p><p>“Ritual magic that includes sacrifices is something you have no experience in.”</p><p>“You’re mistaken,” was all Harry said, but Malfoy snapped to attention. “And in this case, I’m not planning to sacrifice a human or an animal. I’m a virgin, Mr. Malfoy. That’s what I’ll be laying on the altar. And you know very well that in the deflowering of a virgin, the virgin has to be the one getting penetrated.”</p><p>Malfoy held still for a long moment. Harry was somewhat entertained to see the cavalcade of expressions that passed across his face, but he was also still deeply annoyed with himself for never thinking to tell Malfoy that he was a virgin and of course would bottom. It wasn’t the kind of thing that should have been missed. It wouldn’t alter the outline of the ritual <em>Harry </em>held in his head, because he’d known it all along, but it could mess with Malfoy’s concentration.</p><p>What Malfoy said, for some reason, was, “You’re twenty-six years old.”</p><p>“That doesn’t age me out of the ritual requirements.”</p><p>“I—did not mean that. I mean that I would have expected to lose your virginity long before this. Draco certainly did.”</p><p>Harry arched his eyebrows. “Maybe you shouldn’t be thinking of me as your son.”</p><p>Malfoy’s face flushed such a deep red that Harry was sure it was the end of the conversation, and it turned out to be. Harry closed his eyes to return to his meditation, but he did add, “I’ve looked up pain-relieving charms and lubrication charms. Don’t worry about it.”</p><p>Malfoy thumped out of the room and closed the door. Harry half-shrugged and concentrated again. He had to be able to lower his mind to the precise calm depth required by the ritual, and to do it instantly. As experienced as he was in meditation, that still required practice.</p><p>Getting Sirius back was all that mattered.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Chapter 2</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“You trust me to cast this spell on you?”</p><p>“I wouldn’t be in the middle of this forest with you if I didn’t.”</p><p>Lucius let out a shuddering breath and nodded. Potter, who baffled him more and more lately, stood naked in the middle of the Forest of Dean. Sitting next to him was a tiny chunk of obsidian that would be the subject of the next harvesting.</p><p>They needed an altar, and there were specific circumstances that had to come about to turn the obsidian into one.</p><p>“I’m ready now,” Potter murmured, eyes as distant and clear as they had been on the day he had told Lucius he intended to lay his virginity down as sacrifice. The conversation, and now the look, had disturbed Lucius. Not that Potter intended to give it, not that he hadn’t told Lucius, even, but that he was—</p><p>So <em>cold </em>about it.</p><p>Lucius swirled his wand in a slow pattern, and began the chant. The spell was one of the most powerful curses he knew, and it seized control of him a few minutes after he started it. The magic flowed on and waved his hand in specific, careful patterns, whether or not Lucius willed it so.</p><p>It meant that he had time to watch Potter.</p><p>Potter shuddered, his head bowed. Invisible knives carved open the skin on his chest and shoulders, flooding his naked form with blood. The cuts continued, down his arms and then his legs, to his hands and feet. The blood was only the first part of the spell, though, and while it lapped the piece of obsidian, the stone did little more than shudder.</p><p>Then Lucius slashed his wand down and began the second part of the curse.</p><p>Potter’s caught breath was the only sign that he had even noticed. He lifted his head and stared past Lucius into the trees, while the curse took its sacrifice of pain from him. Lucius had been subjected to this spell once by the Dark Lord. He knew it was agonizing.</p><p>Potter stood there as if it was nothing, every tendon and ligament in his body dedicated to bringing his godfather back.</p><p>It made something cold and tight grow in Lucius’s chest, as well. But the spell still had control, and the obsidian was finally growing in response to the waves of pain that had joined the blood.</p><p>In a few seconds, it had snapped into a much longer, broader plank, but it still didn’t look much like an altar. Potter turned to face it and held up his hands, his face still blank.</p><p>Lucius cast the third part of the spell, because he couldn’t not.</p><p>Potter did close his eyes as the spell severed the little finger on his left hand and spun it around in the air, stripping the skin and meat from it before entombing the bone in the obsidian. But that was all.</p><p>Lucius wished there had been <em>some </em>reaction. But he got more than he wished for when the spell ended and Potter abruptly sank to his knees, then to his back, passing out with spectacular quietness.</p><p>“Shit!” Lucius scrambled towards him, his chest beating with his own pain and fear, just imagining the repercussions that would happen if someone decided that he had murdered Harry Potter here in the Forest of Dean. His shaking hand could barely open his buttoned pocket at first and draw out the Blood-Replenisher, but he closed his eyes and willed himself to calm, and then he had it. He forced open Potter’s jaws and drained the potion down his throat.</p><p>He didn’t bind the wound where the finger had been, however. This harvesting process was as much a part of the ritual as the final preparation that he and Potter would do within the pentagram, as much a part of the curse that had been placed on Borgin. The Blood-Replenisher would ensure Potter didn’t die of the wound, and that was all Lucius could do.</p><p>“Lucius.”</p><p>The name hit him like a Blasting Curse. Lucius found himself staring down into Potter’s muddled eyes and willing them to clear, to show that he was coming back to life and not in danger of—what? Lucius didn’t know. As he had admitted to himself, the wounds wouldn’t be fatal.</p><p>Potter blinked at him once, then sat up. The wounds on his chest and hands were already closing, except for the place where his little finger had been. The ones on the rest of his body would take a while, and the pain would linger in his bones and body for as much as a month afterwards.</p><p>“Thanks,” Potter said, and reached out to pick up the robes that he had dropped on the ground near him. He was smiling as he looked at the altar.</p><p>Lucius swallowed and nodded. He didn’t know what unnerved him more, the smile or his own reaction to hearing Potter speak his name.</p><p>*</p><p>“I should do it. My purity is already tainted.”</p><p>“That’s exactly why this won’t work,” Harry said, rolling his eyes. Had Malfoy not <em>read </em>the instructions Harry had left for him? Or the text of the ritual at all recently? He hadn’t seemed surprised by any of the requirements before this, so Harry had thought he knew it well. “I need to make a sacrifice of my own innocence.”</p><p>“You could tear your soul.”</p><p>“I don’t think so,” Harry said, glancing over his shoulder as he picked his way through the thick forest that surrounded the hippogriff sanctuary. “It’s a rejection, not a murder. And isn’t that an odd thing for you to say?” he added, coming fully to a stop and facing Malfoy. He wondered if he had made the wrong choice after all, if Malfoy would begin to act increasingly unreliable. Merlin, he hoped not. “I wouldn’t think that you thought of hippogriffs on the same level as humans.”</p><p>Malfoy flushed and averted his eyes. They were both carrying their wands lit with <em>Lumos </em>Charms although it wasn’t full dark; it was raining so hard that they stood a chance of losing each other in the thick branches and encircling dusk otherwise. “I am only—I don’t like the thought.”</p><p>“Nothing about this ritual is remotely likable.” Harry shook his head and faced forwards into the gloom again, studying the thick fence of thorns in front of him. It was meant to keep young hippogriffs from escaping into the wild before they were ready and poachers from approaching too easily, but its real value was as an anchor for the Muggle-Repelling Charms. It wouldn’t do for the Muggles of Edinburgh to know there was a hippogriff sanctuary not far from them. “Except the end result.”</p><p>“Why did you decide to resurrect your godfather? Why weren’t you content with your friends and your victories after the war?”</p><p>“They had families. I didn’t.”</p><p>“I still was under the impression that the Weasleys regarded you as part of their family. Despite what you said to me the other day.”</p><p>Harry turned to stare at Malfoy, and kept his stare piercing and incredulous enough that eventually the man shifted in place. “Are we going to discuss this <em>now</em>? Or are we going to get the ingredients that we came here for?” he asked.</p><p>“Of course we are going to get what we came here for. But I would like to discuss your motivations with you later.”</p><p>Harry shrugged. “I don’t mind. We need trust between us for the ritual to work.”</p><p>Malfoy took a breath as though he would dispute that, but he never ended up releasing it. His reasons to keep it to himself were all fine with Harry, as long as they meant Malfoy didn’t get in the way at a crucial juncture. Harry was busy reaching out with his wand in one hand and the Resurrection Stone in the other.</p><p>Softly, he spoke to the Hallows, in the ringing, drifting tone that he couldn’t say was aloud or in his mind even after eight years of using it. But they listened to him and spread waves of destruction and time up and down the fence, simultaneously ruining the magical parts of it and regressing others, so that the fence was a young thicket of thorns and not nearly so imposing. Harry hopped over it after a few minutes and began to jog across the wet grass.</p><p>Malfoy followed perhaps a minute later. Harry shook his head. The man was acting strange, and over an ingredient that he didn’t need to help collect. Harry had actually suggested that he stay at the Manor, but he’d refused. Perhaps they did need to have that talk after all.</p><p>In the meantime, a hippogriff was running parallel to them, wings spread as though it would launch into flight to warn the herd at any second. It appeared to be a dapple grey on the horse part of its body, as much as Harry could see something that far away through the rain and the murk.</p><p>Harry stopped and bowed. The hippogriff gave a cautious stamp of one foot, but when Harry stayed in the bowing position, it moved closer. A large female, Harry saw after glancing up once and then directing his eyes back to the ground, and yes, she was a dapple grey, with even the eagle feathers around her neck a bedraggled misty color in the rain.</p><p>Harry snapped his eyes away again when the hippogriff tilted her head to regard him. Then she saw Malfoy behind him, or so Harry supposed, since she stared pointedly past his shoulder and screeched.</p><p>“Back away,” Harry snarled under his breath.</p><p>Malfoy presumably had the sense to do so, since Harry heard crushing grass. The hippogriff, in the meantime, was right in front of Harry now, and she bowed her head in a regal way, nearly to her knees. Then she knelt down to invite him onto her back.</p><p>Harry smiled and stepped closer to her. It felt, oddly, easier than it should have been, to be this deceptive.</p><p>But then, he had always known he was coming here since he investigated the structure of the ritual and how they had to hunt down the ingredients. He would do anything for Sirius. Anything to bring him back.</p><p>The Elder Wand was in Harry’s palm, seemingly unnoticed by the hippogriff until Harry raised it to the height of her shoulder. Even then, she merely turned her head to look curiously in his direction.</p><p>So she could do nothing to prevent Harry from casting a long slashing curse down her shoulder.</p><p>Screaming in pain, the hippogriff leaped to her feet and tried to fly away from him. The slashing wound interfered with the movement of her left wing, and she galloped in a circle for a moment before she was able to half-fold the wing and back away from Harry. Her haunting cry this time seemed to ask him what she had done to be punished this way.</p><p>Harry stared at her, and indifference welled up in him. This had been the hardest part of the sacrifice, the hunt, the part he wasn’t sure he could do. He had to feel truly that this was a worthwhile sacrifice, and not care about her pain.</p><p>That he had hurt her so, even if the wound would heal, and perhaps ruined her trust in humans forever was a <em>detail.</em></p><p>There was a crunching feeling in the center of his chest, as if he had been carrying a pane of glass there and had just cracked it. Harry nodded. He had tainted his purity, his innocence. This particular part of the harvest was concluded.</p><p>He turned around and walked back towards Malfoy, who had stood motionless behind him and seemed to be watching the wounded hippogriff instead of Harry. “You wanted to have that talk? Let’s get back to your Manor.”</p><p>Malfoy twisted his head quickly and watched Harry walk past as if he were a dangerous predator. Then he fell in behind him.</p><p><em>Dangerous predator might be right, </em>Harry thought, as he lengthened his stride and felt something like a cool breeze travel through him. <em>Maybe he needs reassurance that I won’t hurt someone who helps me. Easily enough given.</em></p><p>*</p><p>“I want to know what you meant about not feeling like part of the Weasley family.”</p><p>Potter frowned at him across the glass of hot chocolate that the elves had pressed on him the minute he came in the Manor, for some reason. Lucius certainly hadn’t ordered it. “That’s what you want to talk about?”</p><p>“You <em>did </em>say that we would talk about it when we returned to the Manor. Was that a lie?” Lucius could feel a harsh pulse beating in his throat at the notion that it might have been. There was no way for them to successfully conduct the ritual if their trust broke.</p><p>“No,” Potter said slowly. “I just thought that you might want to talk about something—never mind.” He shrugged. “It was simple, really. My friends had a lot to go through with their families after the war. Ron’s family had lost Fred. One of his brothers,” he added, probably seeing the blank look in Lucius’s eyes. “And my friend Hermione Memory-Charmed her Muggle parents so they would go to Australia. She had to find them, had to reverse the Charm, and had to work to rebuild trust with them.”</p><p>Lucius raised his eyebrows. He would not have thought the self-righteous girl his son had described would have the courage to do that.</p><p>But then again, he couldn’t rely on Draco’s descriptions, he had already ascertained that. Draco had never described Potter in a way that would have resolved into the young man in front of Lucius, this researcher of ritual magic and practitioner bound for the Ritual of Bone and Soul.</p><p>“Hermione had to spend a lot of time in Australia. With her family. And the Weasleys…” Potter shook his head. “They drew in on themselves. They tried to protect Mrs. Weasley and George, Fred’s twin, as best as they could. I was never told that they wanted me to go, but I saw that it was more difficult for them when I was there. They couldn’t look at me without being reminded of the war and what they lost.”</p><p>“So your survival was not enough for them.”</p><p>Potter looked at him, steady and calm, which made it all the harder to bear his gaze. “If the war had cost you your son, would you have wanted one of his friends in your Manor all the time? Would you have been able to look at him without bitterness?”</p><p>Lucius grimaced. “A point well-made, then.” It struck him as incongruous that Potter could so rationally argue about things like this while being utterly <em>ir</em>rational about the sacrifices that he was making for Sirius Black’s sake, but it wasn’t the time to talk about such things. “And so you distanced yourself from the family.”</p><p>Potter nodded. “By the time Hermione came back from Australia and the Weasley family had finished a year of mourning, they were bound by their experiences. Changed. Hermione is much closer to her parents now, and the Weasleys are much closer to each other. They’ll start to talk about something—the Grangers, Ron and his brothers—and then stop and speak to each other with just their eyes. I’m outside.”</p><p>It was said without bitterness, something Lucius was not sure he could have managed. He poured more Firewhisky, at a loss to do anything else. “And Sirius Black can provide you with that family you are missing? How?”</p><p>“He knows more about my parents than anyone else alive right now.”</p><p>Lucius swallowed. The way Potter spoke as if Black was <em>already </em>among the living…</p><p>He glanced at the man and then away. There was a fire in those eyes, banked but living, that he should have noticed before. Of course, no one who wanted to perform the Ritual of Bone and Soul was exactly sane.</p><p>And Lucius wanted to remove the Dark Mark. And he wanted to see this through to the end.</p><p>He would be lying if he said that he wasn’t dreaming of what would happen in the ritual pentagram, too.</p><p>Either oblivious to or ignoring Lucius’s thoughts, Potter leaned back on the huge couch he’d taken up nearly all of and added, “And I barely got to know Sirius in the two years we had between the time I found out he was innocent and the time he died. We spent a few hours or weeks together here and there. I want to know him more.”</p><p>“Will he be grateful to you for pulling him back from the Veil?”</p><p>“How should I know?”</p><p>Lucius paused. He had thought he’d come to the end of the surprises Potter could throw at him, but no, it seemed not. “What if you go through all this performance of the ritual, all these sacrifices and harvesting and hunting down ingredients, and he tells you to put him back?”</p><p>Potter laughed in a low, dangerous way. Lucius wished that he didn’t feel such a pull towards him when he did that.</p><p>“I can’t do that.” Potter shrugged. “We’ll argue about it and make up and have cracks between us, the way family does. But either way, he’ll have to be alive to deal with it.”</p><p>*</p><p>Harry woke slowly from an intense dream of Sirius standing in front of him and yelling at Harry for disturbing his rest. It could have been a nightmare, and it probably had been inspired by Malfoy’s question earlier that evening about what would happen if Sirius got upset about being resurrected, but it made Harry smile anyway. All his dreams of Sirius did that, no matter what the content.</p><p>He heard someone pounding on his door. The fact that the wards hadn’t activated and yanked him out of sleep with the first knock pretty much left only one person it could be.</p><p>Yawning, Harry fetched the Elder Wand and went to open the door to Malfoy. Malfoy stepped in and glanced suspiciously over his shoulder. Harry did the same to appease him, but he wasn’t worried. Other wards in the corridor would have warned him even earlier than this of anyone’s approach.</p><p>And, well, even though Harry only lived in one flat in the building, that hadn’t stopped him from blanketing the whole thing <em>thoroughly </em>with wards.</p><p>“What is it?” he asked, as he shut the door behind Malfoy and turned to face him. Malfoy hadn’t bothered to remove his cloak, although it was warm in Harry’s flat. He was pacing back and forth across the drawing room, staring around as though he expected the carpet to come to life and attack him.</p><p>“There was an Auror raid on my home today.”</p><p>Harry blinked. “I thought that was a normal occurrence.”</p><p>Malfoy swung to glare at him. “They seemed surprised to find nothing, and said specifically that they had tracked my magical signature near a hippogriff sanctuary. There is no telling where else they might have found it.”</p><p>Harry scowled. They had scattered the harvesting of the ingredients widely enough that he hadn’t thought discovery was a problem, especially considering the short time that would elapse between the start of the hunting and the ritual actually being performed. But then, they’d left behind more evidence at the hippogriff sanctuary than usual.</p><p>“All right,” he said. “Then we’ll step up the timing of the ritual.”</p><p>Malfoy’s head snapped back as if Harry had punched him. “We can’t do that.”</p><p>“Why not? It doesn’t depend on the phases of the moon.” Harry did think Malfoy would have known that, but he was going to make some allowances for the man’s rattled state.</p><p>“We aren’t ready. We don’t have all the ingredients.”</p><p>“Yes, we do,” Harry said. “The only ones remaining were the homunculus, which I had made by an alchemist before I visited you the first time, and your willingness and mine. Unless you’re unwilling.” The dread that clenched his heart was real—to have wasted all this time, to have found a perfect candidate and to have to let him go—but then the still waters of his own determination settled into place. If Malfoy refused to help him, Harry would find someone else. He would perform the ritual. Sirius <em>would </em>come back.</p><p>“You didn’t tell me about the homunculus. Just as you didn’t tell me about your virginity.”</p><p>Harry paused. This objection wasn’t a refusal, but he didn’t understand it. “I meant to relieve you of worry about the homunculus tomorrow. And I really did think I’d already told you about my virginity being a sacrifice. I’m sorry.”</p><p>“Listen to me, Harry.” Harry started, but Malfoy was stepping forwards to regard him from so close, eye-to-eye, his hand reaching out to touch Harry’s shoulder—the first time he’d touched him at all other than after the sacrifice to create the altar, when he’d needed to feed him potions. “This ritual won’t work without trust. You know we have to move as one when it begins.”</p><p>“We won’t have a problem with that. The magic of the ritual itself, and my determination to bring Sirius back, and your determination to get rid of the Dark Mark, will—”</p><p>“I cannot achieve that state of determination if I do not trust you.”</p><p>Harry stilled himself the way he had stilled his panic over possibly losing Malfoy’s help a few minutes earlier. “What do you need to know?”</p><p>*</p><p>Lucius withheld the urge to gasp. It had worked. He had been sure that Potter would turn his back and tell him to leave, preferring to cling to his secrecy rather than admit Lucius to the inner sanctum of his motivations.</p><p>But looking into Potter’s eyes again, Lucius realized he should have known better. What was important to Potter was performing the ritual. Nothing mattered in the face of that.</p><p>“I want to know why you didn’t tell me right away that you were a virgin.”</p><p>Potter stirred impatiently and walked down the short corridor that led towards the kitchen. Lucius followed. It was a plebian place, he saw, with nothing of the grandeur that he knew Potter could afford. Of course, he hadn’t seen the library yet. “That was an oversight. I honestly thought I’d told you.”</p><p>“Then let me ask the question in a different way. Why did you <em>stay </em>a virgin?”</p><p>Potter turned and considered him from where he’d started a kettle brewing with a casual wave of his wand. He didn’t appear to have a house-elf, either. “At first because there were more important things to me than dating. Then because I had a few terrible dates with people who were just interested in having sex with the Boy-Who-Lived so they could go report it to the papers. Then because I started my research into rituals and realized that my virginity could be a valuable sacrifice.”</p><p>Lucius swallowed with a click of his throat. “Your desire to reclaim your godfather sounds to me like obsession.”</p><p>“Oh, it is.” The tea had finished with a swiftness that made Lucius think it must have been half-made already. Potter Summoned a tray with lemon, milk, sugar, and half a dozen other things on it, and shoved it towards Lucius. He used nothing but milk in his cup. “I used to be obsessed with defeating this Dark wizard after my life, and then with learning more about my family, and now it’s this.”</p><p>“You know it’s obsession and you’re not interested in curing it?”</p><p>“What would <em>curing </em>it leave me?” Potter shook his head. “Still with no family and with no connection to family to speak of.”</p><p>“You could start over,” Lucius suggested. “Make new friends if you no longer feel comfortable with the Weasleys and Granger. Go on holidays. Research the Potter family in some of the old archives in Britain.”</p><p>“I tried that,” Potter said unexpectedly. “For two years. Everywhere I went on holiday, I got recognized—unless I was in Muggle communities, and frankly that’s hard for me to do now, after I’ve been out of them so long. I tried to make new friends, and people were either so in awe of me that they had no normal reactions left, or wanted to use me for their own gain, like the people I dated. Everyone was so disappointed in me when I didn’t become an Auror, when I didn’t settle down with Ginny Weasley or some other fresh-faced girl, when I didn’t continue to be a shining beacon for them.” He shook his head. “Maybe it’ll be easier with a solid rock to build on.”</p><p>“And you think Black could be that rock for you.”</p><p>“He’s the only chance I have left.”</p><p>Lucius found himself looking away from the honesty in Potter’s face. He’d asked, and he felt like a fool for expecting a different answer. Of course only desperation and obsession would drive Potter to seek <em>Lucius’s </em>help in the first place.</p><p>“Is that enough for you to trust me?” Potter asked quietly. “Or do I need to find someone else for the ritual?”</p><p>“No, I can do it,” Lucius said, hoarse in spite of himself. He turned back and blurted out the idea brewing in his head before his native caution could override it. “I—I thought you were softer and more naïve than you are.”</p><p>“Eight years of longing hardened me even more than eight years of studying ritual magic.” Potter gestured to Lucius’s cup and the tray. “Your tea is getting cold.”</p><p>Lucius drew his wand and heated it again. Potter lifted his own cup in a mocking salute, his mouth twisting a little.</p><p>“Do you have any other questions that I might answer?”</p><p>“I was still seeing you through the lens of what I expected,” Lucius admitted. “The innocent boy who was going too far on impulse and who I’d probably have to catch and redirect. It’s not <em>soothing, </em>exactly, but it’s somewhat reassuring that you have studied ritual magic as much as you said, and that you’ll see this through.”</p><p>“And I promise that you won’t be in any more danger than the Ritual of Bone and Soul would usually entail.” Potter studied him for a moment. “If getting rid of the Dark Mark isn’t temptation enough for you, I’ll see you rewarded after the ritual, too. If that’s something you want instead of disassociating yourself from someone who resurrected the dead.”</p><p>“I don’t care about that,” Lucius said.</p><p>“Then why did you bring it up?”</p><p>In the end, Lucius had to fall back on what he had said about being glad that Potter was fully committed to the ritual, and Potter nodded and began discussing plans to conduct the ritual that night.</p><p>Lucius wrapped his cloak around himself as he stepped outside Potter’s flat and looked back at the closing door. Long after it had closed, he stood there, staring at it and trying to understand the man who had been behind it.</p><p>The anger and frustration of the Auror raid had rolled away from him like rain in the face of an Impervious Charm. Lucius’s mind lingered on the way Potter’s eyes had gleamed with eagerness as he discussed the ritual pentagram instead, and the habit he had of twisting his head to the side so that he could frown at Lucius when he made a point about getting the harvested ingredients safely to the pentagram.</p><p>They would be doing the ritual in the tangled, half-ruined garden of Grimmauld Place.</p><p>As Lucius turned away, he decided that that was, in a way, a kind of hopeful omen: what was half-ruined might yet half-grow.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Chapter 3</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>It was time.</p><p>Harry could hardly breathe with how hard his heart was hammering. He didn’t reach up to brush the sweat off his forehead, though. He kept his gaze on the altar in front of him instead, the long slab of obsidian with his own scrap of finger bone lost somewhere in it, in the center of the pentagram formed with small pieces of black basalt carved with the appropriate runes.</p><p>He had thought that having lost a finger might impair the way he handled his wand, but it didn’t seem to have. Perhaps holding the Elder Wand was a factor in that.</p><p>The homunculus, which had absorbed a large part of the gems in one of the Black vaults, lay silent and still in the upper point of the pentagram. Harry had half-wondered if it would remind him of Voldemort’s baby body, but it didn’t. It was only a form, like a doll, with mitten-like hands and black beads for eyes. The <em>potential </em>it had to absorb magic was what made it cost so much, not the materials.</p><p>In the pentagram point to the left of the homunculus lay the Hand of Glory, and in the point to the right of it the horn chopped from the head of the Acromantula Transfigured into a unicorn. Harry stood in the point next to the Hand of Glory. Malfoy would take the one next to the horn.</p><p>At least, that was where they would stand until the ritual began in earnest.</p><p>Harry turned at the sound of an Apparition, but his heart pounded no harder. Again, he had strung wards all around the ancient Black house that would warn him whether anyone hostile to their purpose was approaching. And the magic that surged towards him had grown oddly familiar over their harvesting expeditions.</p><p>Malfoy was taking his cloak off as he approached the pentagram. He stopped for a moment as though to consider the runes or the positioning of their ingredients one to another. He locked eyes with Harry.</p><p>“Once we begin this, there is no going back,” he said.</p><p>Harry smiled. “I know,” he said. He didn’t bother to hide the joy in his voice.</p><p>Malfoy shook his head and laid down the cane that Harry knew held his wand. Then he turned to unbuttoning his robe.</p><p>Harry was the one who had to begin the ritual and conduct most of it. Malfoy would only bring in his offering of the Dark Mark when it was fairly far advanced. Harry turned to look at the altar, and saw the first soft, questioning flicker of blue light on it. Placing these ingredients like this had begun the ritual, but Harry needed to take the next step.</p><p>Harry drew in his breath. “<em>Voco Sirius Black.</em>”</p><p>The blue light leaped into being, blazing all around the altar before turning to a darker violet. Harry took his shirt off. His eyes were locked on the flames, waiting for the moment when he would have to place the homunculus on the altar. For the moment, however, the fire remained violet instead of black, and he frowned.</p><p>“You should undress further,” Malfoy said. “It will show the ritual that you are fully committed to all parts of this, including the part where you lay your virginity down.”</p><p>Harry glanced at him, and swallowed a little when he noticed that Malfoy was already naked. But the fire continued to waver and didn’t turn the black color that he needed it to, so Harry undid his trousers and lowered them to the ground, still gazing at the altar.</p><p>The flames halted, then deepened a shade before beginning to waver back and forth again.</p><p>Reassured, Harry bent down to undo his socks and then lowered his pants. The grass within the pentagram prickled against his feet, but Harry didn’t care. The flames had become deepest indigo, and the roar of whirling air against his senses was picking up.</p><p>Malfoy shifted in his pentagram point, and Harry glanced at him. He was hard. Good. That would make this sacrifice easier.</p><p>Harry stared at the flames. Black, and he used his own magic to whirl the homunculus into the air and deposit it on the altar. The fire wrapped around it eagerly, sucking at the materials it was made of.</p><p>In a few seconds, the bead eyes fell away from the homunculus’s head. Harry gasped as he watched the flames eat into the silk-like material of the doll’s body, and the silk turn into skin here and there, in glistening strips. Then it halted.</p><p>Harry nodded to Malfoy, and Malfoy bent down and neatly flipped the horn into the air. For a second, Harry’s chest clenched as he watched it somersault, thinking it would end up somewhere other than the altar, but it landed, point down, in the middle of the obsidian, and the flames leaped over to it. They touched the horn as delicately as Harry remembered the Fiendfyre caressing the diadem of Ravenclaw.</p><p>And then the horn exploded.</p><p>Malfoy flinched back, even given that he must have expected it, but luckily, he didn’t leave his point of the pentagram. Harry found that he couldn’t take his eyes from the altar. The horn was twisting and untwisting, losing its substance to the lapping flames. Harry’s breath was coming quicker to match the horn’s destruction, but the rhythm fell out of place at the exact moment that the last of the horn dissolved.</p><p>And what looked like shards of bone flew to fill the homunculus’s body.</p><p>Harry smiled slowly. Those would be Sirius’s bones, when he came back to earth.</p><p>The flames danced and sang, and the homunculus rose briefly, increasing in size. Harry watched it hungrily, but it grew only to about half the size of an adult human being before it flopped back on the altar, and the small arms spread wide, yearning.</p><p>Harry knew what they needed. He reached out to the point of the pentagram nearest him and flipped the Hand of Glory into the air. He had to use both hands, since it wasn’t anything like so light as the horn, and it covered the altar rather than embedding itself in it.</p><p>It didn’t matter.</p><p>Spirals of flame seized on the sides of the giant’s hand, burning off the skin, the flesh, the muscle beneath, and taking them into the homunculus. When enough of the Hand of Glory was gone for Harry to see the homunculus beneath it, it was clad entirely in human skin, the missing patches filled in, and there were muscles bulging and rippling in the arms like swimming eels beneath the surface of a pond.</p><p>Harry swallowed. The flames were a bright, clear blue again, and turning slowly so that they pointed towards him and Malfoy. The last two points of the pentagram. The last two who had to make sacrifices.</p><p>Malfoy met his eyes, his expression calm. Then he nodded and extended his arms.</p><p>Harry crossed from his point of the pentagram to Malfoy’s, aware of the insistent singing of the flames behind him.</p><p>*</p><p>Lucius was stunned, and impressed. It seemed that so far the notoriously tricky Ritual of Bone and Soul was working just as it ought. As if the bone truly would be the bone that Potter had sacrificed to the altar and the ones made from the false unicorn’s horn, and the soul would be the taint that Potter had inflicted on his. Or the soul summoned back from the grave.</p><p>And from the determination with which Potter moved towards him now, another part of it was going to be completed soon.</p><p>Potter stood on his toes when he entered the same point of the pentagram, and brushed his lips across Lucius’s. Lucius shuddered, because the kiss had been clumsy to the point of a shock, and because the spark that leaped between them was so potent.</p><p>Ritual magic, only, of course. But Lucius thought he was not alone in finding it powerful. Potter juddered back, his eyes widening.</p><p>Then, of course, he tried to shoulder past it and kissed Lucius again.</p><p>Lucius took control of the kiss, sinking his hands into Harry’s hair. Harry tried to press forwards, but Lucius held him still.</p><p>There were no strictures on the sex they had in the ritual, except that the virgin had to be penetrated and they had to remain within the point of the pentagram where Lucius had begun. There was no law, no rule, that said the sex had to be hasty or painful, although for all Lucius knew, Harry might think it would be a better sacrifice that way.</p><p>But Lucius was determined to make sure that it was painful for neither of them, and would still fulfill the ritual’s instructions.</p><p>It took a long moment, but Harry at last melted into the kiss, opening his mouth with a soft sigh. He didn’t seem to know what to do with his tongue, either, but Lucius coaxed him into a gentle exchange that left Harry a trembling mess against him.</p><p><em>That will do, </em>Lucius thought, and pulled back from the kiss to study Harry.</p><p>His face was dazed, his cheeks a brilliant red. Lucius didn’t think he’d seen him look that alive since they began the preparations for the ritual. He kissed Harry again, this time on the cheek, and whispered, “Do you want to be on your back or on top of me?”</p><p>“It has to be on my back.”</p><p>“No,” Lucius said. “There is nothing in the ritual’s instructions that says so.” He had revised them last night, to make sure, and while Harry might be the expert on ritual magic that he had presented himself as, Lucius knew much more about sex. “Which way?”</p><p>“You’re—not offering on my knees.”</p><p>“I want to see your face.”</p><p>Harry blinked as if that had never occurred to him. Lucius took a step back and let his gaze slip down Harry’s body for the first time. Harry was half-hard, perhaps from the kiss. He stirred and grew more erect as Lucius watched.</p><p>“I want to make sure I’m not hurting you,” Lucius said. “And I want to see you the first time you have sex. The first one ever to do so.”</p><p>Harry nodded slowly, his eyes still wide and with something that might have been the beginnings of puzzlement in them. He hesitated and then said, “On top of you, then.”</p><p>Lucius nodded, unsmiling. He had thought that might be the case. “Then let me arrange myself more comfortably,” he said, and began to work spells on the grass in his point of the pentagram that would allow him to lie on his back without hurting his spine.</p><p>Now and then he glanced at Harry, who was still watching him with a furrowed brow. Lucius didn’t think it was worry over Lucius’s comfort, or even his own. He was probably wondering why Lucius didn’t simply bull ahead and do whatever was necessary for the ritual.</p><p>Lucius sighed and decided that wasting time on words right now would be counterproductive. If he was right about what would happen when they began the sexual portion of the ritual, Harry might understand soon enough without them, anyway.</p><p>*</p><p>Harry cast a lubrication charm on his arse while Lucius was arranging the grass to his satisfaction. After a glance at Lucius’s prick, curving up until it almost touched his stomach, he added a few pain-relieving charms, as well.</p><p>His skin was tingling with the heaviness of the magic in the air, while his lips burned with the kiss. That didn’t make much sense, Harry thought absently as he watched Lucius sprawl out on his back, then sit up and cast a few more Cushioning Charms in the direction of his hips. He’d kissed Cho and Ginny before. Harry <em>knew </em>what kissing was like. This wasn’t—</p><p>It shouldn’t have made such an impact on him.</p><p>But it had.</p><p>Harry shook his head, impatient with his wandering thoughts. What did it matter what he felt as a result of this? The only important thing was summoning Sirius back and giving him the chance to live again, and Harry the connection with his family that he needed.</p><p>When Lucius looked up at him and nodded, Harry moved forwards, then halted again. He’d just realized that he was thinking of Lucius by his first name. Was that wrong? Was that going to affect the intensity of the ritual, or its patterns, or—anything else?</p><p>Then he decided again that it didn’t matter. He had to focus on Sirius, not his own reactions, unless he started doing something that would contradict the instructions for the ritual.</p><p>“Harry? Is something wrong?”</p><p><em>He’s calling me by my first name and nothing terrible has happened yet, </em>Harry told himself, and he moved forwards. “No, it’s all right. I’ve cast the lubrication charm,” he added, and started to sit down on Lucius.</p><p>Lucius’s hands came up and clenched his hips. Harry started. The touch of those hands, and even Lucius’s eyes when he sought them out, burned in the way that the kiss had.</p><p>“Maybe I want to cast my own charm,” Lucius whispered. “And savor this for a moment. It’s been a long time since I had this particular pleasure.”</p><p>Harry blinked and wondered if that was about having participated in the Ritual of Bone and Soul before, or having had sex with a virgin, or what. But he wasn’t interested enough to ask. He sat back and tried to muster his patience when the idea that Sirius’s return was only a few minutes away was burning in him harder than any touch.</p><p>Lucius’s fingers skated up his hips and circled gently, on skin that Harry hadn’t known was that sensitive, and which made him jump and start. Lucius leaned up to kiss him. Harry went with it, as little as he liked the way his own perceptions seemed to soften and narrow in the middle of that kiss. By the time Lucius leaned back again, he was a bit dizzy.</p><p>“Now,” Lucius said. His cock was slick with a charm Harry hadn’t heard him cast, and his chest was heaving. Harry squashed his own discomfort that he hadn’t noticed the magic—Lucius was an ally—and eased back, reaching down just enough to touch the base of Lucius’s erection and guide it into him.</p><p>Harry had expected the burn, this time, even with the pain-relieving charms that he’d cast. The lubrication slicked and made a squeaky sound, which he’d expected, too. He was a virgin, not ignorant.</p><p>But it seemed nothing could really prepare him for the feeling of something inside him until it happened. Harry started and squeezed down despite himself, then closed his eyes and panted. Lucius ran his fingers in more gentle circles down Harry’s sides and up again, his voice slow and soft. “It’s all right, Harry. Take your time.”</p><p>“I shouldn’t need to,” Harry muttered. His eyes were still closed, even though he should have been able to force them open. His forehead was slick with sweat. “Sirius needs me.”</p><p>“Would he want you to damage yourself in the course of trying to bring him back?”</p><p>“No,” Harry muttered. He opened his eyes and found Lucius’s waiting for him as if he had anticipated the need Harry would have to look at someone else. Lucius simply nodded.</p><p>“When you’re ready, then you can begin to move.”</p><p>To Harry’s shame, he needed another minute before he could truly say he was ready. Then he decided he would just begin as he meant to go on, and sat down hard in the second before he began to rock forwards.</p><p><em>Ouch. </em>Harry yelped as a different burn began, and Lucius’s hands reached up and restrained him again. Harry tried to look around to see what the flames on the altar were doing, but Lucius shook his head.</p><p>“It will be all right,” he said, voice thick. “Keep your focus on me.”</p><p>*</p><p>For Lucius, that jolt Harry had taken to slide down him had been pure pleasure, but obviously not for Harry. And from the way his arse tightened and his hands clenched into fists, he was annoyed more than he hurt. He wanted to simply charge through the pain and summon his godfather back.</p><p>
  <em>He hasn’t had anything but this for eight years. Nothing but obsession for eight years.</em>
</p><p>Lucius held Harry still and repeated as gently as he could, “Keep your focus on me. It’s all right, Harry.” He glanced down and noted that Harry’s cock was soft against his stomach. “Remember that for the ritual to work, you need to come, as well.”</p><p>Harry let his eyes flutter shut and waited as though he was seriously thinking about Lucius’s reminder as some kind of condition. Lucius felt a pulse of pity travel through him. For all the sacrifices he had made, for the insane determination that Harry had shown in trying to harvest the ingredients for the Ritual of Bone and Soul, he was still a young man who hadn’t let himself experience much of life.</p><p>“All right,” Harry said, but his cock hadn’t moved. Lucius reached down and stroked it.</p><p>Harry’s eyes flared open with a sharp gasp that seemed to rip through him, and Lucius nodded to him while continuing to stroke.</p><p>“You can do this,” he said. “You can do whatever is necessary to make sure that your godfather comes back<em> and </em>that you enjoy yourself.”</p><p>Harry blinked at the last requirement, as if no one had ever said that to him before, as if he hadn’t let himself feel it. And while he was still sitting there like that and seemed more open than Lucius had yet seen him, Lucius readjusted the angle of his cock and drove upwards.</p><p>This time, the gasp was one more of pleasure than shock. Harry clenched down, and Lucius no longer thought he was trying to live with pain. Lucius gave him an encouraging smile and thrust again.</p><p>“This isn’t—part of the ritual,” Harry said, while he rocked in place with an expression of confused enjoyment.</p><p>“It doesn’t have to be. The only instructions for the ritual are that the virgin is penetrated, that we both come, and that you feel the intensity.”</p><p>“I can feel that.”</p><p>Harry’s eyes were fixed on him now, and Lucius was pleased to see that they shone as he had once imagined they might, the only time he allowed himself to imagine this since Harry named the ritual he wanted to do. He thrust again, and Harry answered with a movement of his hips, and the true sex had begun.</p><p>*</p><p>Harry had read enough about ritual sex that he’d thought he knew what to prepare for. And he’d been the center of rituals that he’d conducted by himself and with a few people who didn’t know his real identity, and that had been—enough to make him sure that he knew what intensity really was.</p><p>Until now.</p><p>The burning that flashed up from his arse through the center of his chest, which he’d thought he’d been ready for because it was just pain, had changed character. It was pleasure, now, which gripped his organs and did strange things to them. And made him want to <em>keep moving.</em></p><p>He hadn’t thought one way or the other about whether he would enjoy sex with a man. What did it matter? He would do it if he had to, if a ritual required him to, and that was the only thing that mattered.</p><p>Now, Harry could see why some men preferred men. Or at least having something thrusting inside their arses.</p><p>“All right, there?”</p><p>Lucius’s voice was a rumble, deep and amused. Harry managed to nod, and reminded himself that no matter how it felt, this was for Sirius, not him. He caught his breath and twisted his head to see what was happening to the color of the flames on the altar.</p><p>They had darkened a little, but towards indigo rather than black. Harry swallowed, and began to bounce a little harder on Lucius’s cock.</p><p>“I would prefer to go slowly.”</p><p>Harry jerked his head at the altar. “Yes, and that would be fine if the flames weren’t getting ready to go back to an <em>earlier </em>stage.” Cold gripped his throat at the sight that they might have done all this and it might be <em>wasted.</em></p><p>“As long as we’re moving, they will not.” Lucius picked up one of Harry’s hands where they were dangling down near his sides and brought it slowly up to near his lips. Harry couldn’t tell if he actually kissed it or not, the touch was so light. “Will you indulge me?”</p><p>Slowly, Harry nodded. Lucius had done enough for him that he could, he thought. He squeezed a little with his inner muscles and resumed a slower pace than he’d been trying for.</p><p>“Thank you.”</p><p>Harry gave Lucius a faint smile. What in the world was he supposed to <em>say </em>in a situation like this? “Sure.”</p><p>*</p><p>Harry was beautiful like this, and Lucius regretted that his first time was in the middle of a ritual pentagram, under circumstances that would hardly encourage Harry to linger and realize <em>how </em>beautiful.</p><p>At the same time, Lucius was selfishly glad that Harry had waited to shed his virginity and that Lucius, himself, had been chosen for this ritual. He got to see the beauty, the magic that welled like light through Harry’s skin.</p><p>None of it was death magic, either, the way Lucius had imagined it might be after the darkness he had conjured for Borgin and to destroy the fence around the hippogriff sanctuary. It shone and twisted, thick as the flames sheathing the obsidian altar, but so warm that Lucius could feel it like sunlight on his senses.</p><p>Harry had his eyes closed, now, his movements sharper despite himself. His lips were parted, and Lucius wished he had the right angle to kiss him. He thought about trying anyway, but he didn’t want to call Harry’s attention back to what they were doing or make him self-conscious.</p><p>
  <em>He’s conscious enough already.</em>
</p><p>Instead, Lucius flexed his hips and adjusted his angle, thinking he hadn’t made Harry gasp in a while, and Harry did it again, sitting back and shivering all over. His cock was hard enough now to curl up against his belly. Lucius reached down and stroked it with one finger up the center.</p><p>Harry made a choking sound, staring down at him. Lucius smiled and touched him again. Harry gripped Lucius’s hand with both of his, straining, arching, and Lucius was sure he would have bruises later.</p><p>But it didn’t matter, not when Harry was beginning to come.</p><p>Lucius enjoyed every movement of Harry’s fingers pressing into his skin, and the way his head hung almost completely backwards as he finished his orgasm. When he brought his head down again, his lips were drawn up in a smile that seemed half-asleep.</p><p>Lucius then let go the tight chains of control he’d been clinging to while he coaxed Harry into orgasm. His pleasure took him in talons like a hawk’s and raked through him the way it always did, and Lucius dropped back onto the grass and raised his arms to receive the weight of his lover.</p><p>But Harry was already turning his head to look back towards the altar, even as he remained seated with Lucius going soft inside of him. Lucius looked with him, because it would be a waste not to. The flames were black again.</p><p>And there was a cold wind blowing from them. As he stared, Lucius felt his heart twist in his chest.</p><p>The Ritual of Bone and Soul might demand the caster’s soul, he had told Harry when they first talked about it. And Harry had been sure that the ritual wouldn’t demand his.</p><p>But Lucius, as part of the participation of the sex act and in the harvesting, could also be seen as the caster.</p><p>He became aware that his left arm was rising, without his will, tilting to aim his Dark Mark towards the altar. He fought it, because this was the last sacrifice, the one that would call the soul into the body that waited on the altar, looking like the Sirius Black he had seen all those years ago in the Department of Mysteries, and that meant he should do it of his own free will.</p><p>But his left arm went on rising.</p><p>The Ritual of Bone and Soul approached its completion.</p><p>*</p><p>Harry squinted hard into the black flames. He understood the cold wind that was blowing from them, as he had felt it often enough himself. Cradling the black globe that he’d used to show Borgin his fate had made a faint touch of it surround him. And he’d encountered it in other rituals.</p><p>But it shouldn’t be <em>here. </em>All the descriptions of the Ritual of Bone and Soul said the soul of the being to be resurrected should appear at this point and be drawn into the body, and the artifact that had once contained a piece of a Dark Lord should be sacrificed, which would complete the ritual.</p><p>Lucius gasped beneath him. Harry spun in place. Lucius’s face was white—not pale, but white—and the center of his chest was bulging, along with the Mark on his left arm. The glow of his soul was rising up through his body, perhaps visible to no one but the eyes of someone like Harry, and the gold streaks in the center of the white said he was near death.</p><p>“No!” Harry shouted, even as the air above the altar began to spin, and the Dark Mark began to fragment apart on Lucius’s arm. “I summoned Sirius Black! Leave Lucius Malfoy’s soul alone!”</p><p>He knew it wasn’t his imagination that all the flames on the altar bowed inwards when he spoke Sirius’s name, and then he heard the voice he had remembered so well for eleven years whisper, “<em>Harry</em>?”</p><p>Harry whipped back to face Lucius. Lucius caught his eye and managed to say, through a series of stuttered gasps, “My soul…not the homunculus. The…sacrifice.”</p><p>
  <em>The Ritual of Bone and Soul may demand the caster’s soul.</em>
</p><p>Harry been so sure that couldn’t happen, not when he was the Master of Death. And he had been arrogant enough to think that he would be seen as the sole caster of the ritual, when he had been the one to initiate the process.</p><p>Lucius’s body was actually breaking apart now. Harry had participated in one ritual that had gone wrong, that had reaped the soul of someone who hadn’t been careful enough and had gone outside the ritual circle. This looked like that.</p><p>“No!” he shouted again, and faced the altar. When he raised his hand, the Elder Wand was in it, and he aimed it at the flames, bearing down with his will at the same time. “I refuse this bargain! I call on you to resurrect Sirius Black with the sacrifice of my virginity, my innocence, the giant’s Hand of Glory, the homunculus, <em>my </em>fingerbone, and the unicorn horn! And the Dark Mark,” he added. “I forbid you the soul of Lucius Malfoy!”</p><p>His will shot out and bore down across the circle in a whirling black wind. A blacker one answered it, rising out of the homunculus.</p><p>The winter wind continued to pull on Lucius’s soul.</p><p>And Sirius’s voice whispered again, “<em>Harry</em>?”</p><p>Turning away from him and back to Lucius was the hardest thing Harry had ever done, but he did it. Lucius’s body was dissolving from within like a crumbling Illusion Charm. His soul had risen almost out of it, along with the last fragments of the Dark Mark.</p><p>Harry knew what happened to a reaped soul. It would go into the sacrifice, or the ritual, or the mouth of the summoned being in the case of the ritual he had seen that went wrong, and there would be no rebirth or afterlife for it. It would be treated like a tool, an object, and burned up, consumed, in the use.</p><p>His magic was faltering before the pressure of the coldness coming from the altar. The misty figure of Sirius was forming above the altar itself, hovering there like a spirit, being drawn down towards the body.</p><p>And for the first time in eight years, Harry’s resolve to have his godfather back broke.</p><p>He didn’t shout the spell, simply willed the homunculus out of existence with all the power of his death magic.</p><p>It vanished, and the black flames on the altar froze. Then they began to crack down the middle with sounds so sharp that Harry winced away from them. He turned back to Lucius and choked when he saw that his appearance had returned to normal, and there was no sign of his soul rising through his body.</p><p>Lucius stared up at him. “You worked for eight years to have your godfather bac—”</p><p>“There are some things that have too high a price,” Harry said, and tried not to snap the words. He stood up and walked over to clear the dust of the ashes that had been the black flames from the top of the altar. His hands were shaking, and he looked for a long moment at his left hand and the little finger missing from it.</p><p>All for nothing. All <em>wasted.</em></p><p>But he couldn’t have let the ritual kill Lucius. He had always been determined that if there was a price to pay for having his godfather back, he would be the one to pay for it, and the removal of the Dark Mark was what he had had to offer Lucius. A reasonable gamble, a reasonable price for the danger of the harvesting and the favor of having sex with Harry in the point of the ritual pentagram.</p><p>When Harry glanced over his shoulder, Lucius was getting dressed again, but his left arm was still bare enough for Harry to see that the Mark was gone.</p><p>Harry sighed. <em>One promise, at least, I kept.</em></p><p>*</p><p>“Thank you again for your help, Mr. Malfoy.”</p><p>Harry had Apparated with him back to Malfoy Manor, and now he was staring off into the distance. His voice was heavy, although Lucius couldn’t have named the emotion that was behind it. Bitterness? Well-concealed, if so.</p><p>Perhaps simple grief.</p><p>Harry had turned away when Lucius caught his arm. He shook his head when Harry glanced at him, blinking. “And you think that you should be alone tonight? After what happened there?”</p><p>“I think that I nearly cost you your soul because I was an arrogant idiot. I’m sorry I ever got you involved in this.”</p><p>“I am not.”</p><p>“What? Oh, right. Because the Mark is gone.” Harry sighed. “I’m glad I was able to keep that part of my word to you. But—”</p><p>“I would very much like to have you come in. To talk to you. To spend some time with you in the future, if you’d allow it. And I do not think you should be alone tonight.”</p><p>Harry was staring openly now, his eyes dipping for a moment as if he was imagining the way Lucius’s chest had looked when it was bare, although now the robe was in place. If that was the case, Lucius would not be displeased. “But I nearly got you <em>killed</em>.”</p><p>“In the end, you gave up your godfather coming back for me.” Lucius kept his hold on Harry’s arm and tugged, gently. “That is something no one else has done. Not even when you testified at my trial after the war. That was about paying debts and doing what you could for your sense of justice.”</p><p>“Just because we slept together—”</p><p>“Is it <em>just</em>?”</p><p>Harry clenched his jaw, but he said, “I don’t want you to feel obligated. I don’t want you to ever feel as if you owe something to me, because you <em>don’t. </em>And I told you that I was obsessed with getting my godfather back for eight years. Not to mention all the risks I was willing to take in harvesting the ingredients, and tonight.”</p><p>“What of it?”</p><p>“I’m not <em>right</em>.” Harry shook his head. “I can’t go to a Mind-Healer because I’ve never found one that won’t try to sell my stories to the papers, but I can read well enough. I know what a healthy mind looks like, and it’s not mine.”</p><p>“Do you think I am perfectly healthy, Harry?”</p><p>“Healthier than me, Lucius. I don’t want to drag you down.”</p><p>“What if I don’t think you will?” Lucius asked, and drew him closer. Harry went with the pull, but he was watching him in what was obviously deep perplexity. Lucius stroked his hair away from his forehead, staring at the faded brand of the lightning bolt scar. It occurred to him that he hadn’t got to touch Harry’s hair nearly enough, and that he’d like to. “What if I admire some of the traits I saw you display during our hunt—determination and knowledge and intelligence—and I’d like to have the chance to engage with you more?”</p><p>Harry blinked and searched Lucius’s face with his eyes. He was so painfully bewildered that Lucius didn’t feel the impulse to smile. He waited a few moments, and then added, when the silence thickened, “If that is something you would be open to exploring with me. I did not mean to make you uncomfortable.”</p><p>“I,” Harry said, and looked away. Then he said, “Maybe I need to be uncomfortable, a little. And I never <em>wanted </em>to be alone. I just didn’t think there was anyone who could give me any companionship who wasn’t family.”</p><p>Lucius leaned in and gently kissed the faded scar. Harry looked up at him with wide eyes, but didn’t object.</p><p>Not even when the house-elves brought him hot chocolate, again.</p><p>Not when Lucius herded them both up the stairs, and into a bedroom that he hadn’t shared since Narcissa divorced him.</p><p>Not when they both lay down on the bed, still clothed in everything except their robes and boots, and Lucius drew Harry against his chest.</p><p>Lucius fell asleep while he knew Harry would still have a long time of staring at the ceiling, but at least Harry’s chest was rising and falling against his hands.</p><p>*</p><p>Harry woke in a slow daze. He didn’t feel rested, but he also didn’t feel as though someone had pulled him from a sound sleep, even though he knew that was the case. He sat up and stared around at the dark grey walls and “floor” around and beneath him. It looked like the inside of an enormous, smoky tent.</p><p>“Harry.”</p><p>It was the same voice that had spoken above the altar, and Harry whipped around, face hot and eyes feeling swollen. Sirius was standing in front of him, looking at him with that mad, fond smile he’d had during the summer when they’d both been at Grimmauld Place.</p><p>“Sirius,” Harry whispered. He had no doubt this was real, for a version of “real.” His dreams of Sirius had never been like this, and the air around him was filled with the pulsing of his death magic. “I’m so sorry I couldn’t give you a body.”</p><p>Sirius shook his head. “Merlin, Harry, I’m so sorry that I couldn’t be there for you. But you never need to apologize for failing to do the impossible.”</p><p>“I could have—”</p><p>“Could you have sacrificed Malfoy’s soul for mine? Or yours?”</p><p>Harry closed his eyes. “No.” He had always thought there was no limit to what he was willing to do for his godfather, but there always had been something, lurking in the background.</p><p>“Then it was impossible,” Sirius said firmly. He paused for a long moment, and Harry opened his eyes, drinking him in. He was sure this would be the last time he would ever see Sirius like this, the only time. “But I wanted to know something. Why did you never try to summon my spirit with the Resurrection Stone? You could have, you know.”</p><p>“I was afraid that I would give in to the same temptation Cadmus Peverell did,” Harry whispered. “That I would commit suicide to be with you. I was walking to my death when I saw you the first time with the Stone, after all. That was the only reason I wasn’t afraid of it then.” He swallowed. “Same reason I never summoned Mum and Dad. Or Remus.”</p><p>Sirius nodded, in a way that said he already knew the answer. Harry blinked at him. Then why ask the question? But Sirius spoke, and he knew he was going to know. “Then you always meant to <em>live</em>, Harry.”</p><p>“What do you mean?”</p><p>“You’ve buried yourself in your books and avoided the real world,” Sirius said quietly. “You pulled away from your friends. Hermione would probably say that you were avoiding life.” Sirius smiled then, another fond smile. “But you never intended to die. You were afraid that you might be tempted to commit suicide if you spent too much time in the company of the dead, so you had the self-control not to do it. When it came down to it, you had the morality not to sacrifice someone else’s soul, even someone some people might say deserve it.”</p><p>“He doesn’t,” Harry said softly. “No one does.”</p><p>Sirius nodded. “You have the will to live. Live, Harry.”</p><p>“But your soul is drifting around in the Veil—”</p><p>Sirius snorted. “No, it’s not. That’s the Veil lying to you like the bastard it is, trying to tempt you into it. I’m with your parents and Remus, the way you saw when you walked into the Forest. I’m in a good place, kid.”</p><p>Harry tilted his head. “But I heard your voice above the altar last night.”</p><p>“The Ritual of Bone and Soul <em>can </em>summon someone back to life,” Sirius said roughly. “It doesn’t matter what happened to their body or whether their soul is drifting around or not. The reason it doesn’t work most of the time is that people aren’t willing to sacrifice their soul or the soul of the person they slept with. And a good thing, too.”</p><p>Harry bowed his head. If—</p><p>If it had always been impossible, then the guilt eating him inside now would begin to die.</p><p>A hand touched his shoulder, and Harry’s eyes flew open. He looked up and found Sirius right in front of him, beaming as though Harry was his own son, his own godson, as though he hadn’t played a part in Sirius’s death.</p><p>Spirits couldn’t <em>touch </em>him. It had been one reason Harry had been so desperate to have Sirius back in a body.</p><p>“I’m so proud of you,” Sirius said. “I was worried about you these last eight years, we all were. But I knew you hadn’t changed from the good kid you were underneath. Not when push came to shove.” He gripped Harry’s shoulders and shook them a little. “I’m honored to have you as a godson. <em>Live.</em>”</p><p>Harry caught Sirius in the last embrace he knew he would ever give him, and sobbed once. The air around them was solid for long enough.</p><p>Then it shimmered, and disappeared. The last thing of Sirius to fade was his smile.</p><p>*</p><p>Lucius opened his eyes.</p><p>And Harry was still in his arms, sleeping hard, in the worn-out way that would be expected if someone who had performed intense ritual magic.</p><p>Lucius stroked Harry’s forehead slowly, fingers lingering on the lightning bolt scar. Harry stirred under his touch, and Lucius slowed it, but didn’t stop. Harry opened his eyes and stared up at him.</p><p>He looked far more at peace than Lucius had expected. Lucius didn’t know how that happened, but it made him cautiously hopeful, enough to ask the next question that he had rather than waiting on it.</p><p>“Shall I have the house-elves bring us breakfast?”</p><p>There was a long moment when the air seemed to hang frozen between them, ready to be broken, the way Harry’s innocence must have broken in his chest when he injured the hippogriff. Then Harry nodded, as slowly as Lucius had touched his forehead.</p><p>“Yes, I’d like that.”</p><p>And he smiled.</p><p>Lucius caught his breath, hoping he didn’t sound dramatic, but Harry was already sitting up and stretching and reaching for his wand to cast a pain-relieving charm on his arse, so he doubted Harry noticed. That left Lucius to stare at Harry’s back and make his own decision.</p><p>The smile made him want more.</p><p>
  <em>Who knows if I’ll get it?</em>
</p><p>But he hadn’t known he would survive having his soul almost ripped out of him, either.</p><p>When Harry looked at him again, Lucius smiled back.</p><p><b>The End</b>.</p>
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